The management of hazardous waste materials, including radioactive waste, is important to maintaining the environment. Radioactive waste can be defined as any material that contains or is contaminated by radionuclides at concentrations or radioactivity levels greater than a particular level set by the government. This level set by the government is based on a determination of what constitutes an unacceptable level of risk to the environment. In addition, radioactive waste is material that has no foreseen future usefulness. Waste disposal refers to placing the radioactive waste in approved radioactive waste containers, at approved sites, without the intention of retrieval. Making sure that the radioactive waste containers are secure raises special concerns because some nuclear waste materials retain high levels of radioactivity for thousands of years.
There are numerous tools that can be used to monitor the radioactive content of waste being disposed of in the radioactive waste containers. For example, counters are used to measure the radiation of the contents of a radioactive waste container and various other parameters. Typically, the contents are checked to ensure that they meet various regulatory limits as set by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. Another type of check that is done on the counter data is a verification that the testing performed by the counter reflects the actual contents of the radioactive waste container. Both of these types of checks are currently performed manually and are prone to human error. In addition, because of the manual nature of the checking, the process takes a relatively long time and this makes it difficult to process and interpret large volumes of data in a timely fashion.